Raul Siqueira, Game Director for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, has revealed during an interview with GamesRadar that the reimagining of Lara Croft’s 1996 adventure will use the separate difficulty options seen in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
For those of you who didn’t play Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the game allowed players to tweak the difficulty of various key mechanics such as combat and puzzles to their liking, creating a customised experience tailored to their preferences. For example, the combat could be toned down to make it easier.
I think the biggest lesson that we took from [the Survivor Trilogy] is tuning difficulty based on players’ expectations. One of the things I think we got really good at towards the end of that trilogy was we had a lot of different options for players that wanted to tune the experience to their liking. We found, because Tomb Raider blends a bunch of different things together, there are people that are really into puzzles and they want puzzles to be very difficult, but they’re not great at combat, so they want combat to be easy.
With that in mind, Siqueira revealed that developer Crystal Dynamics wants fans to be able to “customise their challenge to their liking” for the new game. That was one of the things that we really wanted to preserve and make sure that players had a good foot. The balance of that is an ever-changing thing. We’re tuning it pretty much until the end,” he said.
As for how similar the sliders would be in Legacy of Atlantis to Lara’s 2018 adventure, he added that the kinks are still being worked out, “but, like, you can expect a very similar mode for it.”
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is pencilled in for release on February 12, 2026 for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S. The game is a full overhaul of the 1996 Tomb Raider, and sees Lara travelling around the globe to uncover the lost secrets of Atlantis, which like the original game, will take her to Peru, Greece, Egypt and more, uncovering long-forgotten tombs and lost valleys along the way. The franchise also celebrates its 30th anniversary later this year.
[Source – GamesRadar]